


Trouble's What You Find Round Here

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Gen, Major Character Injury, Police, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27048310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: On a routine call-out, Yaz finds herself faced with more than she'd bargained for. Alone, injured and afraid, she's forced to consider her future, her own mortality, and her relationship with the Doctor...
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan, Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair
Comments: 8
Kudos: 29





	Trouble's What You Find Round Here

Yaz doesn’t know how long she’s been laying on the pavement. The streets around her are deserted; the houses earmarked for demolition and the residents long gone. As she takes a laboured, effortful breath, she tries not to linger on this thought; tries to maintain a spark of optimism, despite the fact that her hope is fading fast. Tries to will someone to pass by; tries to will someone to drive past. She’s clad in lurid high-vis, but without anyone to see it, it’s of limited use.

She’d been irritated when the call had come in, ordering her over to Burngreave to check out reports of a disturbance. It isn’t usually in her remit, but she’d been the only officer free to go and investigate the problem of people hanging around in the empty shells that had once been family homes. It was late and she’d wanted to go home and watch TV with her sister; she was due to finish her shift in less than an hour and the Burngreave call would take her almost half of that time just to get to, but there was no arguing with Sergeant Sunder, especially not when he’d been working overtime to try and keep up with the sudden spate of violence that was filling the residents of the city with unease.

She’d confirmed her attendance with the utmost reluctance and then driven over to the opposite side of the city, blue lights and sirens flashing. She still loved doing that; still loved the feeling of power it gave her as the traffic before her parted in waves, allowing her to slip through on her way to a job. It makes her feel important; makes her feel like she matters. Makes her feel all the things she’d hoped for when she’d started the job.

Those feeling had evaporated when she’d arrived at the address provided, and she’d found nothing of note at first; she’d looked around, listening out for voices and squinting through the blacked-out windows in search of tell-tale torchlight or the smell of smoke, but there had been none of those things, and so she’d checked her watch with impatience, approached the battered-looking front door of one of the houses and raised her fist to knock. If nothing else, it would have spooked anyone out of hiding; it gave them fair warning that she was coming in, and she’d been readying her most authoritative voice to warn them of her presence when several things had happened at once, all in rapid succession.

The door had slammed suddenly inwards, there had been a sound like a champagne bottle being popped, and then a gang of tracksuit-clad teenagers with scarves pulled up over their faces had exploded out of the building and streamed past her as she’d stood, frozen to the spot and feeling a creeping sense of horror that she couldn’t immediately comprehend.

Words had filtered back to her as they’d sprinted away from her; the same words, over and over, repeated with exhilaration and an undercurrent of fear. There were whoops and cheers, as though they’d done something admirable; she could hear the sharp sounds of skin meeting skin and realised they were high-fiving each other. And always the words, over and over, echoing back to where she was still stood.

_I can’t believe we’ve done a copper._

Yaz hadn’t understood at first. It wasn’t until she’d felt a warm wetness spreading across her skin beneath her stab vest that she’d realised what had happened, and then she’d crumpled backwards onto the pavement, beginning to hyperventilate as the world had seemed to rush in, the darkness pressing down on her like a weight.

Now, as she lays on the dirty pavement, staring up at the stars, she knows dimly that she should reach for her radio and call for help. She should scream; she should try to do something, _anything_ to attract attention, although in these deserted streets, the chances of anyone passing by is slim to none. She presses both her hands to her abdomen, feeling a slow, sluggish pulsing as blood seeps from the wound, and tries to catch her breath and formulate a plan of action. There’s a sharp, agonising pain rippling across her stomach, and coupled with her rapid breathing, it’s making her feel woozy and unfocused, nausea and pain working their way through her system and rendering her powerless as she feels herself going into shock.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to end, she thinks. She’s nineteen years old, still a probationer, still living at home. She’s just discovering who she is; just making friends; just taking her first tentative steps into the world and finding out the wonders that are out there. Just taking her first tentative steps _off_ -world, and the sudden thought of the Doctor and Ryan and Graham is almost as painful as the hole punched through her abdomen. She thinks of the three of them, lit by the console’s golden glow: her found family; and then her thoughts turn to her parents and to Sonya and she begins to cry as the very real understanding that she might never see any of them again begins to overtake her, rendering her breathing all the more erratic and causing her adrenaline to spike. This isn’t how she had ever imagined her death to be, not even in those dark months three years earlier. She’d never pictured herself bleeding to death in a particularly grimy corner of Sheffield, about to become another statistic. She’d always been the agent of her own demise, not a victim of the atrocities of another. She’d never been the victim, full stop; never imagined her death to come with such sudden, awful finality, such mess, or such agony.

Perhaps it’s better like this, she reasons, trying to calm herself with pragmatics. Rather this, something terrestrial, than dying of something hideous and violent in space, with the Doctor having to return her body to her parents, and explain to them in the broadest of strokes what had happened, leaving out all the major details. Somewhat selfishly, she thinks that she would rather this, and her be remembered as someone heroic who was killed in the line of duty, than a mundane death; a quiet death, and any guilt she might feel about such self-indulgence is absolved by the knowledge that in a few minutes, she could well be dead, and then selfishness will cease to matter.

Her death, as it stands – and she sees it, for a moment, as though an actual person, close by and with its head bowed, as though waiting for her – might be violent and premature, but she’ll be remembered, and it’s the thought of that which hardens her resolve. She doesn’t want continue to live on only as a memory. She shouldn’t inhabit only photos and videos and people’s hearts and minds; she wants to be present and full of life and vibrance, racing around Sheffield with her sister and bouncing around the universe with the fam. She knows what she has to do to avoid her seemingly-inevitable fate, but the pain is impeding her strength and making it hard to will her body into motion.

She tries not to think about someone finding her, if the worst comes to the worst – later tonight, early tomorrow, or even _later_ tomorrow. She tries not to think about her parents having to identify her; tries not to picture her funeral, attended by her colleagues in uniform, her grieving family, Ryan and Graham with stoic expressions, and the Doctor, somewhere at the back, quiet and unobtrusive. She tries not to think about what could be said about her short, limited life; tries not to think about her parents sitting numbly in the flat while watching her death be played out on the news, another statistic of the Sheffield crime wave.

“No,” she says quietly and with resolve, taking a deep breath and trying to stop crying, but even that hurts. She can feel her own blood running stickily across her stomach, oozing across the sweaty skin of her back and dripping onto the pavement below her. She can feel the warmth of it as it seeps across the paving slabs beneath her, and gushes over her fingers; still hot, as though unaware that it has left the bounds of the acceptable and departed her body altogether. She wonders, slightly manically, how long it will take to dry; wonders whether the rain forecast overnight might wash it away, erasing all trace of her once they’ve moved her. The thought of that is sobering, and tentatively, she lifts one hand from the wound, pressing down harder with the other to compensate, and reaches for her radio with sticky, scarlet fingers. Pressing down on the talk button, she takes a deep breath and steels herself to speak.

“Sierra one-two, Sierra one-two, this is Yankee Kilo, over.” The words are delivered through gritted teeth; she wants nothing more than to beg for help, but adherence to the codes of practice has been drilled into her so thoroughly that she knows that screaming or crying will only muddy the waters; far better to be succinct and follow protocol.

“Yankee Kilo, Yankee Kilo, this is Sierra one-two, go ahead, over.”

“Code Zero, officer down, Queen Street, over.”

“Yankee Kilo, say again, over?”

“Code Zero, _officer down_ , over.”

“Yankee Kilo, we’re on our way, over.”

With a small smile of relief, she removes her hand from the radio and presses it back to her stomach. Help is coming. This seems positive, but in a vaguely abstract way; the pain is making her feel oddly detached from herself, and things that had seemed urgent now seem far less so. She’s starting to feel dizzy now, and her head lolls sideways as she tries to focus on the stars overhead, but the effort of it makes her feel cross-eyed. Her wound is still throbbing under her fingers, blood spilling onto the street and she fights to keep from crying out as she gazes upwards and wishes, wishes, wishes for help to arrive quickly. There’s the distant sound of sirens and she allows herself to hope, but then the noise grows fainter and she begins to cry again, silently and without hope, as she stares up at the sky and prays.

Her radio crackles back into life at her shoulder.

“Yankee Kilo, Yankee Kilo, this is Sierra one-two, please confirm your status, over.”

The words wash over her like water as she closes her eyes and imagines herself back in the safety of the TARDIS, standing in the doorway with her friends and looking out at the Horsehead Nebula. She can feel the warmth radiating from it; feel the glow of it on her skin and a feeling of absolute peace and tranquillity that comes from knowing she’s in a place of safety.

“Yankee Kilo, Yankee Kilo, this is Sierra one-two, I repeat, _please confirm your status,_ over.”

She pictures herself floating free from the TARDIS doors, out into the vacuum of space, and there’s no fear in her mind; no terror or uncertainty. She wants to be there, amongst the stars; wants to reach out and grasp them, and she moves in the zero-gravity with ease, twisting and turning as she looks around at the galaxies and solar systems around her.

There’s the distant sound of a siren, growing louder and louder, but that doesn’t matter much now. It’s not real; not in the same way the stars are; not in the same way the TARDIS is.

“Yaz! _Confirm your status!_ Over!”

She holds out one hand feebly, reaching, reaching, reaching for a nearby dwarf star, and the light is blindingly bright, and…

Whiteness.

Then nothing.

* * *

“Yaz?”

The voice sounds impossibly far away. There’s other sounds that come with it – rhythmic beeping, and further away, the faint sound of traffic – but there’s something about the way that the voice speaks her name that makes it seem the most pressing thing for her to focus on. She tries to go towards it, feeling her body and mind screech in protest as her eyes flutter open and immediately screw shut again, assailed by glaringly bright lights.

“It’s alright… Hakim, get the lights… I said they’d be… there… Yaz, it’s alright, try again. Come on, sweetheart. Come back to us.”

Yaz opens her eyes again, a millimetre or so at first, and this time there’s relative darkness. She allows herself to open them further, and as they adjust she realises she’s in a hospital bed, with her parents sat on hard, primary-colour plastic chairs beside her. Looking around, she takes in the small room and the outline of someone stood outside the door, blocking the light from the corridor, then looks over at the cheap, thin curtains, through which faint, watery sunshine is streaming. Everything in the room is cloyingly over-cheerful, and she wants to close her eyes to it all again but knows how doing so would be received. She struggles to remember what happened, and then an ache in her chest and an answering stab of pain in her abdomen call to mind the dark street in Burngreave, and the gun, and the youths, and she blinks hard, realising that she’s made it; she’s still alive. She wants to cheer, but she hasn’t the strength.

Focusing at her parents is uncomfortable; they both look exhausted, with red eyes and worn-down expressions, and Yaz wonders how long she’s been here. There’s an uncomfortable oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, and she thinks about reaching for it before deciding not to; it must be there for a reason, after all, and it would only disconcert her parents. There’s a dull, throbbing ache in the left side of her abdomen, and she wonders what they’ve hooked her up to; she remembers the raw agony of the wound when it had first occurred and thanks god for painkillers. The bedlinen is a bright, clean white, and Yaz wonders again whether her blood is still pooled on the pavement she’d fallen on; it seems like a less important question now she’s in relative safety.

“Hey,” her mum says, then bursts into tears, and her father puts his arm around her shoulders, drawing her close and letting her weep against his neck. After several moments, her mother reaches for Yaz’s hand with one of her own and clings to it, locking her fingers around Yaz as though afraid to let go.

“Hi, love,” her dad mumbles, rubbing her mum’s back soothingly. “Sorry, she’s just… it’s been a bit…”

“How long?” Yaz croaks, realising that her words are lost in the mask. Reaching up, she lowers it enough to be understood, and repeats effortfully: “How long… how…”

“They brought you in last night,” her dad says, his tone pragmatic, but Yaz can see the fear in his eyes, not yet extinguished, even here in… well, Intensive Care, presumably. “You were… you weren’t in a good way when they found you. They had to re…” he takes a deep breath. “They had to resuscitate you in the ambulance.”

Her mother’s sobbing intensifies, as does her grip on Yaz’s hand, and Yaz thinks about complaining then decides that doing so would be churlish.

“They took you into surgery, and they’ve patched you up, love. It’s alright. You’re going to be alright.”

“We were so bloody…” her mum begins, sniffling into a tissue she’s dragged out of a pocket, letting go of Yaz’s dad and looking over at her daughter. Her lip trembles, and when she speaks again, her voice is thick with emotion. “They came and kn-knocked on the door and… you see it on TV, d-don’t you? But it’s s-so much w-worse… I saw the b-blue l-lights and then th-them c-coming across the courtyard and I j-just knew… I told your dad and h-he didn’t b-believe me… but then they kn-knocked on our door and their f-faces… I just…”

Her sobs redouble, and Yaz’s dad looks pained.

“I never thought it’d be you,” he says sadly, looking over at her with a shell-shocked expression, and Yaz thinks she’s never seen him so subdued, or so visibly troubled by emotion. Hakim Khan was usually the stoic one of the family; to see him so unsettled is jarring. “You don’t think… you never think… it’s not something that happens, is it? Only then it… then it is.”

Yaz wonders who the uniformed officers were; she makes a mental note to find out and thank them.

“What… what about…” it hurts to speak, and she has to take a long pull on her oxygen mask, but she perseveres. “What about the lads who did it?”

“Long gone,” her dad’s mouth tightens into a hard line, and anger starts to burn in his gaze. “Sergeant Sunder thinks it was opportunistic, but they’re not sure, so they’ve got someone on the door.”

“Ah.”

“They’ll get whoever it was,” her mum says shrilly, her free hand balling into a fist, and she lets go of Yaz’s hand and twists her tissue in her lap until it disintegrates. “They will. They have to. They can’t just… they can’t… they can’t do this! They can’t hurt my baby and then…”

“Where’s Sonya?” Yaz interjects, desperate to avoid upsetting her mother further, and a change of topic seemed safest.

“She went to get coffees. We’ve not slept, we’ve just been here,” her dad looks down at his lap. “You scared us, kid.”

“Sorry,” Yaz mumbles, feeling abruptly embarrassed by what had happened. “I-”

The door opens then, and as if on cue, Sonya steps inside, holding aloft three Styrofoam cups that are steaming gently in the chill air of the hospital. On seeing Yaz, she lets out a little shriek and they tumble to the floor, but Sonya seems unconcerned as she races across the room and flings her arms around Yaz with relief.

“Ow,” Yaz manages, but Sonya only clings to her all the more tightly, punching her lightly in the upper arm. “Son…”

“Don’t you ever…” Sonya says fiercely, and Yaz realises she’s crying, which is all kinds of wrong. “Don’t you _ever_ do that to us again. You big idiot… you scared the shit out of all of us.”

“Sonya, language,” her mother chides, half-heartedly. “And let go of her, you’ll tear her stitches.”

“Good,” Sonya mutters, letting go of Yaz and wiping her sleeve over her face, before punching Yaz again in the shoulder, harder this time. “That’s what she gets for frightening the crap out of us.”

“Language!”

“And you dropped the coffees,” Yaz’s dad says with a theatrical sigh, looking over at the puddle of steaming liquid by the door with an expression of longing.

“Dad, I…” Yaz looks between her family members, feeling suddenly weary of their company and craving some time by herself to try to come to terms with what had happened. “Why don’t you go and get coffee together? I’ll be fine… they probably need to check me over… and you need a break.”

“I don’t know…” her mother hums uncertainly, looking to her dad for guidance. “We shouldn’t…”

“I’ll be fine,” Yaz assures them, trying to look as well as she’s able to. “Just… Sonya, can I borrow your phone?”

“Why?”

“Because I dunno where mine is, and there’s someone I need to speak to.”

“Is it Ryan?” Sonya asks at once, her expression becoming mischievous, and for that Yaz is grateful; it brings some degree of normalcy to proceedings. Sisters teasing each other; what could be more commonplace?

“It might be,” Yaz narrows her eyes at her warningly, ready to pull rank on the grounds of being the oldest _and_ being injured. “And I’ll be deleting his number once I’m done, alright?”

“Fine,” Sonya grouses, handing the device over without further prodding needed. “Just know I’m _very_ disappointed.”

There’s another round of careful hugging and tearful voicing of emotions, then a nurse bustles in to check Yaz over, tutting at the spilled coffee on the floor. Yaz turns her head away as the nurse lifts back the covers, hitches up her hospital gown and checks the dressings; she might feel more steady now that she’s here in hospital, but she’s still not ready to see the damage done. The nurse seems pleased, however, and rearranges everything how it was, before giving her a polite little nod and exiting the room to go and see her next patient, throwing a reassurance over her shoulder that someone would be along to clear up the mess.

Once she’s gone, Yaz unlocks Sonya’s phone and opens BBC News. It’s there at the top of the homepage for the Yorkshire region, and Yaz reads the short article with trepidation, wondering what has and hasn’t been confirmed.

_Breaking: Police officer shot in Sheffield_

_Hallamshire Police have confirmed that last night one of their officers was involved in a confrontation in the Burngreave area of the city which ended with the officer being shot with a firearm. A group of youths seen fleeing the area on foot is thought to be involved; they had been involved in incidents across the area earlier in the evening, including damage to the window of a property and attempted theft of a vehicle._

_Det Ch Insp Sasha Williams said: “Our officer was doing their job, attending a callout, when they were callously targeted by criminals and seriously injured. They remain in a serious but stable condition in hospital.”_

_T_ _he officer’s name and rank has not yet been confirmed._

_Anyone with information about the shooting or the group of youths is asked to get in touch with the police._

After digesting this, and feeling a surge of gratitude towards the force for keeping her name out of the press, Yaz plucks up the courage to make the necessary phone call. With shaking fingers, she dials Ryan’s number; he answers on the sixth ring, his tone politely confused.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Who’s me?”

“Yaz.”

“ _Oh._ Whose number is…”

“It’s Sonya’s, I’ve borrowed her phone for a bit. I dunno where mine is.”

“Oh,” he pauses for a moment, then continues in a tone that sounds indecently near to enthusiastic: “Did you hear about this police shooting?! It’s all over the news… Grandad keeps banging on about it, saying it’s lucky it weren’t you. Do you know who it was? Was it anyone you know?”

“Yeah,” Yaz’s voice cracks. “Yeah, I do know.”

“Shit, are they alright?”

“No,” Yaz closes her eyes and swallows thickly before continuing: “No, I’m not.”

“Yaz, what… I don’t…”

“It was me, Ryan.”

“Yaz…” there’s a long pause. “Yaz, that’s not funny.”

“Am I laughing?”

“Nah, it can’t have been you… it can’t… you…” Ryan’s tone is laden with disbelief, and anger too. “Nah. No way. It… no. Don’t be daft. This ain’t funny. Stop joking with me. Stop it. It ain’t funny.”

“Ryan.”

There’s something in the way she says his name that seems to convince him, and she hears him let out a long, trembling breath, and knows he’s trying to find the right words.

“Shit,” he says quietly, and then asks: “What hospital you in?”

“Urm,” she peers around the room for some kind of clue, her eyes finally settling on a small poster on the wall advertising patient services. “Royal Hallamshire.”

“Right,” he said brusquely. “Be right there.”

He hangs up before she can say anything more, and Yaz replaces her oxygen mask, staring up at the ceiling and trying not to think about the pain in her side or all the words he hadn’t said.

* * *

Ryan and Graham arrive an hour later, bearing flowers, snack food and a pile of extremely trashy magazines, all of which Yaz refuses to admit having any interest in, although she’s pleased to have something to do other than count the ceiling tiles and browse local news sites on the off-chance anyone has leaked her name. She sends her family out of the room as Graham and Ryan stand nervously by the door, looking uncertainly from her to the machines and back again.

“They don’t bite,” Yaz tells them. She’s sat up now, and while its uncomfortable, it at least means she can look at them rather than the ceiling. The oxygen mask is placed carefully to one side, and she’s under strict instructions not to overdo it, or it will become compulsory again. “And nor do I.”

“I just…” Ryan hovers, visibly caught between wanting to approach her and not wanting to be in the vicinity of the many monitors and wires. “Does it hurt?”

“I got _shot_ , Ryan,” Yaz deadpans. “Yeah, it bloody hurts.”

Both of them flinch, and she rolls her eyes.

“I’m still here, aren’t I?” she notes, and they exchange an unreadable look that irks her. “I’m fine. Really. I’ve told the police everything I remember, which isn’t much, and the doctors have said they’re just going to keep me in here for a few days while everything knits itself back together a bit, then I can go home.”

“Well, that’s… good,” Graham chances, moving closer to the bed and putting down the magazines beside Yaz’s feet, before pulling up a chair beside her. “That’s something, love.”

“Ryan, come here,” Yaz holds out her hand to him and he edges tentatively closer, his expression wary. “Come on! I’m not a bloody alien. Speaking of which, where’s she?”

“Urm,” Ryan sets the flowers and bag of snacks down on the side and takes Yaz’s hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze before taking a seat beside Graham. “We called her.”

“About a thousand times,” Graham chips in. “And we couldn’t…”

“She didn’t pick up. We left her a voicemail.”

“More like ten… or twenty…”

“So I’m sure she’ll turn up soon.”

“She doesn’t like hospitals,” Yaz remembers, feeling a sudden rush of sadness and irrational guilt, as though she’d done something awful by being shot and half-expecting the Doctor to visit. “She probably won’t.”

“Yeah, but you’re… you know,” Ryan gestures vaguely, not wanting to say the word aloud.

“Shot?”

“Yeah, that,” his eyes settle on her abdomen uncomfortably, and he blurts: “Which side is it?”

Yaz points, and he shudders.

“We never thought…” Graham begins, his expression full of remorse, and he reaches over and settles his hand over hers. “I heard it on the radio this morning, and the first thing I said was, ‘god, it’s dangerous this policing business! Hope nothing like that ever happens to our Yaz!’ I didn’t… we never thought…”

“Come on, danger has a tendency to find us,” Yaz notes, flashing him a reassuring smile and giving his hand a squeeze. “And this danger happened to be armed.”

“Do you remember it?”

“Kinda. I remember just being really calm. I remember thinking all kinds of stupid stuff, laid on the pavement, and then I was here.”

“How…” Ryan breaks off, as though unsure whether to continue, and drops his gaze

“What?”

“How bad was it?” he mumbles, keeping his eyes fixed on the floor.

“Dad said they had to resuscitate me in the ambulance,” Yaz says calmly. In the time since regaining consciousness, she’s grown pragmatic about the facts of the matter; she can lay them out with objectivity. Ryan and Graham blanch at her words, but she ploughs on nonetheless: “Then I went into surgery. They had to transfuse a lot of blood into me, but it worked. There’s some internal damage, but it didn’t actually hit anything major, so I’m hoping I’ll be back at work in a few months.”

“Sorry,” Graham’s eyes went wide with horror, and he let go of her hand. “You want to go _back_ out there?”

“Yeah.”

“With the people who tried to kill you?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?!”

“Because it’s my job,” Yaz shrugged, then winced. “And it’s what I do. PC Khan, remember?”

“That’s not all you do,” Ryan notes. “You travel with us and the Doctor.”

“Yeah, and I’ll be back to that, and all. Don’t you worry,” she beams at him with more cheer than she feels. “Can’t keep me down for long.”

* * *

Yaz can’t sleep. The pain in her side is throbbing now, even with the morphine coursing through her system, and she’s tried everything she can to doze off: counting sheep, counting backwards from one hundred, emptying her mind, meditation, white noise. She’s flicked through the magazines and gone through her phone, which had been recovered from her patrol car, but she’s still wide awake, and worse still, there’s nothing to stop her mind from wandering.

She’d spoken to everyone she needed to: her family; her senior officers; Ryan and Graham. Everyone except the Doctor; everyone except the one person who really matters, the one person who she hopes will bring a degree of normalcy to proceedings. Well. As normal as the Doctor gets, which isn’t very. She worries how the Doctor will react, knowing how overprotective she can be of her friends, and yet still she craves the Time Lady’s presence; still she craves the hyperactivity and unceasing chatter that will surely make her feel more at ease as she adjusts to being injured.

She wonders why the Doctor didn’t answer her phone; wonders whether she’ll turn up or not, knowing how much she despises hospitals; and as she’s in the midst of that thought, the door to her room cracks open and a shadowy figure slips inside.

Yaz sits bolt upright in a panic then lets out a sharp cry of pain, and the figure steps into the glow from her beside light, which illuminates the rainbow across her chest and a flash of blonde hair.

“It’s true, then,” the Doctor says quietly by way of greeting, and Yaz feels a rush of relief, sinking back onto her pillows with a wince. “I thought… I really hoped Ryan and Graham had got it wrong.”

“What have they said?”

“That you got hurt,” the Doctor perches beside her on the bed in the gloom, and Yaz flashes her a grateful smile as the Doctor looks her up and down. “That you were at work, and something happened.”

“I got shot,” Yaz admits. She feels foolish saying it to the Doctor, as though there ought to have been a more exciting explanation, but the Time Lady only looks down at the blankets with an unreadable expression, picking at a loose thread on the topmost cover. “At work.”

“Is it bad?”

“Yeah, but I’m alright.”

The Doctor takes out the sonic and scans her, head to toe. It’s an odd sensation; for the twenty seconds or so it takes, Yaz has the distinct feeling of being a lab experiment, and then the Doctor scowls at the reading.

“You’re playing it down. This says you could’ve died.”

“Yeah,” Yaz gives a nervous little laugh. This is what she’d expected, but she hadn’t expected the guilt that comes with it; the sense that somehow she’s failed her friend. “But I didn’t.”

“Yaz, this is…” the Doctor looks up at her, her eyes full of fear and concern. “You know, you are _so_ lucky this happened on Earth. You’re lucky that people got to you; that they helped you. But this could have happened out there…” she gestures to the window, and Yaz understands what she means. “In the stars, and it could’ve ended far, far worse. It could’ve been really, really awful, and I could’ve had to bring you home.”

“I don’t…”

“Every time you travel with me, that’s the thing I fear most. Something happening to you, or to Ryan, or to Graham. Something like what happened to Grace. Having to bring your broken body back to your family, and having that on my conscience. You, Ryan, Graham; I can’t do that. I can’t carry you with me like I carry the others.”

“Well, I wasn’t with you,” Yaz folds her arms, resolving not to ask about ‘the others’. The thought of who they might have been or what might have happened to them frightens her, though she tries not to show it. “This was an entirely Earth-based incident, and you’re free of any and all responsibility. Plus, I’m not dead.”

“I know that, but it just…” the Doctor sighs in frustration, pushing one hand through her hair as she exhales. “You’re human; you’re so… breakable.”

“Doctor…”

“How long have they told you that you’ll be out for?” the Doctor says decisively.

“What?”

“Work. How long have they given you?”

“Three months, minimum. Then back, but on desk duties.”

“So, three months until you’re back in the TARDIS,” the Doctor gets to her feet, affixing Yaz with a weary expression that’s full of guilt and self-loathing. “Alright? And that’s final.”

She gets up and slips out of the room before Yaz can speak again, and Yaz can only stare after her in horror, trying to comprehend the weight of the Doctor’s words.

* * *

It hadn’t been final. In the four weeks since the incident, there had been a concerted campaign of in-person nagging from Ryan and Graham, and quite a lot of WhatsApp and over-the-phone nagging from Yaz, and now she’s sat in the TARDIS’s rose garden with a cup of tea, a blanket tucked around her as she leans back on her sun lounger in the artificial daylight.

“How are you feeling?” the Doctor asks, taking a seat beside her and sipping at a tall, luridly-coloured drink that’s bound to have an impact on her hyperactivity later on.

“Sore.”

“Naturally.”

“Happy to be here.”

“You’re _only_ allowed on the ship, alright?” the Doctor cautions warningly, shooting her a stern look. “Nowhere outside. Nowhere unsafe. Nowhere historical. _Just_ on the TARDIS. And that’s only to stop you all from nagging me, got it?”

“Got it,” Yaz concurs with a smug smile. “Don’t worry about that.”

“I just…” the Doctor sighs, looking across the garden at the fountain which was babbling merrily in the corner. “I can’t lose you. Any of you.”

“I know.”

“And I won’t risk you any more than I need to.”

“I know.”

“I care about you all.”

Yaz reaches over and gives the Doctor’s hand a reassuring squeeze.

“I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> Can't stop, won't stop writing Yaz sickfic...


End file.
